Grazed from BreakingFinanceNews. Author: Toi Williams.

International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM) has announced that it signed a 10-year, $10 billion deal with ABN AMRO to provide cloud services to the banking company. The multibillion-dollar service agreement includes the management of the IT infrastructure of the bank and the implementation of a private cloud for the bank’s global operations. ABN AMRO is based in the Netherlands and serves private, corporate, and retail banking customers.

The contract with IBM includes fully managed services for servers, storage, end-user computing, application support, and a help desk. The 10-year agreement also includes the standardization and simplification of the bank’s entire IT landscape. IBM will handle a wide variety of IT tasks for the company, including upgrading its mobile computing operations and maintaining the company’s existing mainframe infrastructure…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

A new initiative backed by IBM and with the involvement of a number of second-tier European vendors was recently launched. It’s always interesting to see these “open initiatives” – they’re generally heralded by triumphant sounding press releases, marketing department-fuelled hyperbole and little else.

Over the past half dozen years or so I have been amazed at the number of times these things have been launched (and, as an aside, does anyone else notice that IBM IBM -0.17% is often the central figure in these deals?). I’ve seen, off the top of my head: DCRM, DMTF, OCCI, ODCA, OSIMM, OVF, SNMP, TOSCA, CAMP… you get the idea. Of these acronyms and initiatives, very few still exist, and even less gained any real traction…

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Efrat Kasznik.

Software vendors across the world are embracing the software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud-based business model in growing numbers. According to Software Equity Group, SaaS software revenues will likely represent about 25 percent of the overall software market in the next five years. Research firm Gartner estimated that global spending on SaaS will reach $22.1 billion by 2015.

Some software vendors are converting their software delivery and revenue models to SaaS, while others acquire SaaS companies to gain access to this market. SaaS mergers and acquisitions transactions grew 25 percent last year, and the median SaaS exit multiple was more than double that paid for traditional, on-premise software targets, according to the Software Equity Group…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/how-to/funding/2014/12/how-the-saas-business-model-affects-valuations.html

Grazed from RenaissanceCapital. Author: PR Announcement.

Workiva, which offers a SaaS platform used by companies to manage the SEC filing process, announced terms for its IPO on Monday. The Ames, IA-based company plans to raise $101 million by offering 7.2 million shares at a price range of $13 to $15. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Workiva would command a fully diluted market value of $581 million.

Workiva had 2,176 customers as of September 30, with 60% of both the Fortune 500 and Fortune 100, including The Coca-Cola Company, Wal-Mart, Cardinal Health, Boeing, Credit Suisse, Google and Chevron. Its ten largest customers make up 5% of revenue. The company’s subscription revenue retention rate was 97% as of September 30, and 108% including additional seats purchased by existing customers. The company’s management team will collectively own 82% voting power-post IPO…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Cloud computing has been named as one of 12 disruptive technologies which will change the relationship between the CIO and the boardroom, according to a report by Advanced 365. The evolving role of the CIO, and the C-suite in general, has long been a feature of modern business. Opinions differ, whether it’s a wag who proclaims CIO to mean ‘career is over’, or whether it’s a report which advocates more fluency and fluidity between executives.

The Advanced 365 paper takes a look at the different types of CIO today and how it fits in to various businesses:

• CIO as manager: A CIO who delivers today, may not be as much of an ideas person but manages the business for commercial success
• CIO as leader: Engaging in and delivering change throughout the organisation, planning for tomorrow and designing new positions within the company
• CIO as entrepreneur: Dreams about the future, seeks out change and innovates against those changes to improve commercially…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Trevor Pott.

Sysadmin Blog Docker is slowly taking over the world. From its humble origins, which we explored on Friday, as an internal project at dotCloud, through to Microsoft’s recent announcement that it will support Docker natively in Windows, Docker looks set to become a major component of modern IT infrastructure.

Today, Docker is powered by Libcontainer, rather than the more widespread LXC. The switch has some very real implications for the future of Docker, for its potential adoption and for its interaction with the community. Libcontainer matters for the same reason that Android matters: control. Consider for a moment that while there are eleventy squillion distributions of Linux out there, almost nobody says "Android Linux."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Srikanth RP.

Though cloud adoption continues to be on the rise, there are still a host of mid-sized companies for whom cloud computing is still a complex topic. Cloudstrats, a startup, aims to do just that by simplifying the adoption of technologies like cloud for organizations. “In today’s world, only large organizations have access to high-end technology solutions.

Most of the industry best practice solutions are not cost effective for others to explore. SMEs and sectors like education intend to leverage IT best practices for their businesses but are inhibited by the costs and unavailability of the right partner to support them. Cloudstrats was founded with the vision to Make IT Simple for all our customers. We intend to accelerate the adoption of latest technologies by enhancing their accessibility for every company in the market,” explains Piyus Kanti, CEO, Cloudstrats. Kanti says that the firm’s aim is to use IT as a success factor for business, instead of being a bottleneck…

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Kip Tom, a seventh-generation family farmer, harvests the staples of modern agriculture: seed corn, feed corn, soybeans and data. “I’m hooked on a drug of information and productivity,” he said, sitting in an office filled with computer screens and a whiteboard covered with schematics and plans for his farm’s computer network.

Mr. Tom, 59, is as much a chief technology officer as he is a farmer. Where his great-great-grandfather hitched a mule, “we’ve got sensors on the combine, GPS data from satellites, cellular modems on self-driving tractors, apps for irrigation on iPhones,” he said. The demise of the small family farm has been a long time coming…

Grazed from ITNews.  Author: Brett Winterford.

Mi9 has dramatically improved the speed at which it can deliver new websites, apps and features and additionally halved its data centre footprint via an aggressive adoption of public cloud and a restructure of its IT operations around the concept of DevOps.

The media company, formerly known as Ninemsn, is wholly owned by Channel Nine after Microsoft divested its share in the company in late 2013.  Under the new ownership structure, the company can now open up about its plans to go ‘all-in’ on public cloud – and not, as previously anticipated, with Microsoft…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeff Burt.
 
Cisco Systems officials have spent much of the year talking about extending the cloud with "the fog."  In January, the networking giant introduced its fog computing vision, the idea of bringing cloud computing capabilities—from applications and data analytics to processing, networking and storage—to the edge of the network, closer to the rapidly growing number of end-user devices that are consuming cloud services and generating the increasingly massive amount of data.

Cisco officials also unveiled the company’s IOx platform, designed to bring distributed computing to the network edge.
Earlier this month, the vendor rolled out the next phase of IOx, which included adding to the list of Cisco products that support the platform and the list of partners involved…